This is intended as a news rather than commentary post. I recently checked with ACT on what the story is with Heather Roy’s Wellington Office which was opened in October 2007. The main function of the office is obviously to give Heather Roy a more visible presence in her Wellington Central electorate campaign. The party tells me that Roy is using her entitlement to open an Out of Parliament office with a support staffer funded by Parliamentary Services. At the moment the office shares a staffer with Heather Roy’s Parliamentary office. From ACT: The office is located on the corner...
Just proving that Douglas brings headlines, I’ve found two other stories discussing his return to ACT. An NZPA report out on Sunday handily re-wrote ACT’s press release for it (as is typical with NZPA), while a more interesting opinion piece by libertarian Lindsay Perigo (whose views always makes ACT look mild) offered some typically blunt advice for the party: It’s fine for Rodney [Hide] to be fashionably gaunt and try to impersonate models, but it’s hard to resist the conclusion that his last-remaining convictions melted away with his adipose. In any event, fashion and fitness shouldn’t be his focus. He...
Former ACT MP Muriel Newman, who now runs her New Zealand Centre for Political Research, was on the Leighton Smith show on Newstalk ZB last Thursday talking about her impending trip to a climate change denial conference run by right-wing thinktank the Heartland Institute. In her chat with Smith, Newman advocated the usual anti-climate change argument that the world is actually cooling. Then she name-dropped, noting that people such as David Bellamy do not agree with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus that global warming is happening. Finally, she added that a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere...